Evan of Snapchat talks about “performing for your friends” as a strange “side effect” of Snapchat. But the instinct to perform is native to the Snapchat medium.<p>I think this is a problem.<p>I went to a concert a few weeks ago. The people beside me would stand still for 10 minutes and then someone would pull out Snapchat. The whole group would turn around, flash a smile and start dancing for the camera. 9 seconds later, they were back to watching the concert.<p>Performance is a cultural virus that affects our happiness and creates a kind of perfect self-consciousness. It’s “instant replay” for all of life. And just like in American Football, when instant replay arrives, we start to (1) glorify the spectacular, (2) hyper-analyze every angle and (3) expect more moments worthy of instant replay.<p>Snapchat pushes us to create more of those “replay worthy” moments. We narrate our lives according to the expectations of our “fans.” I hear 8-year-old kids yell “do it for the likes.” They are quietly subverting their self while sublimating the value of the crowd. How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?<p>Those concert-goers felt the need to misrepresent their experience of the concert. The 8-year-olds adjusted their behavior to optimize for likes. When I was on Snapchat, I loved seeing <i>myself</i> in other people’s stories. It made me feel popular. I, too, adjusted my behavior to appear more likeable on camera.<p>Adjusting Snapchat’s interface will do nothing to address the intrinsic ways that Snapchat reorients our relationships around performance.<p>Perhaps this is obvious, but family and friends should love me the way I am. Not some imaginary version of me. And Snapchat nudges me to fake it.
Teenagers, and for that matter, everyone yearns for smaller private spaces where they can share whatever they want with their closest friends — without any reservations of judgement from their parents, grandmas or uncles. I used to love Instagram, until Facebook decided to make it Facebook v2 by making my entire "friend" list follow me there as well. That means that until I invest a lot of time hiding my story from everyone but my closest friends (and of course no one has time for that), I'll just refrain from posting some of my true self there.<p>On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.<p>I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.
Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage.<p>And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where its main feature has been inherently broken since inception.<p>edit: this post kinda blew up. to see a real side-by-side comparison, <a href="https://imgur.com/a/wuaZi" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/wuaZi</a>
They still haven't moved to the `newer` (not new anymore. been here for 3yrs now) permission modals on Android. The moment I hit the Install button on Google Play it prompts me to give blanket access to 11 different APIs. No way I'm gonna let them have it.<p>Every app that I have on my Android device has been updated to this granular permission modal and for Facebook I manually turned off permissions after they started using the Storage permission to access my camera roll to display a carousel of photos that I've taken recently on my timeline.
> The new Friends page to the left of the camera...<p>> The new Discover page to the right of the camera...<p>This reads like the manual to an early-90s text adventure.
The anti-social-media stance they're taking is probably well informed given their target audience is growing a substantial aversion to oversharing on the long-lived-net and would rather overshare on the ephemeral-net.<p>Their stock isn't necessarily enjoying it as much as they'd probably hoped. I might speculatively buy in if it seems like it's not a Digg v4
They realized that instagram's biggest enemy is the amount of advertising and fake-accounts there is pushed into your stream of photos and are using it to their advantage! clever :)
There is an interesting article by Dan Kaplan on <i>"Why Snapchat is Losing To Facebook And The Strategy It Can Use To Win"</i> [1]. It is an amazing read for anyone interested.<p>In the post, the author outlines a strategy which Snap can use to regain its relevance and importance in the social space. The author mentions how Snap can rebrand itself as a "self-expression company" that respects users' humanity.<p>Interesting to see Snap taking steps in this direction.<p>[1]: <a href="https://exponents.co/snap-facebook-key-competitive-strategy/" rel="nofollow">https://exponents.co/snap-facebook-key-competitive-strategy/</a>
Is this thing still a total bandwidth hog and downloading all snaps in alphabetical order instead the videos I want to see? This app was unusable in countries with low bandwidth like e.g. the Philippines. This is why Instagram wins... Instagram is really really great engineering and testing. I would even say it's one of the best optimized mobile apps out there.
Just a personal anecdote but I have tried installing Snapchat app on my iPhone about a year ago or so. I have spent about 20 minutes tapping and swiping around the app to try to figure out how to use it. I couldn't get how it works and was so frustrated that I have uninstalled it.<p>In addition to UI being most confusing and impossible for me to figure out, it was also super slow on a mobile network in Asia where I was at the time, near unresponsive.<p>If I, as 25-30 years old tech person cannot figure out how to use your mobile app, you got a problem. I completely understand why the user base growth has completely flatlined. I assume there are a lot of people similar to me.<p>I am very bearish on Snap.
This seems like a solid response to Instagram eating their market share, as Instagram suffers from exactly the problem described (of course, as intended because Facebook's entire business model thrives on it).
I'm certainly not in snap's demo, but<p>> You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them.<p>I can't for the life of me understand why I'd need something like this to help me find my existing friends when I want to talk to them.
This is a nice, pro-consumer move, although I wonder if they will lose advertising revenue as a result. One would have to imagine that one of their big sells to Discover advertisers would be that their content is shoved in your face whenever you try to view friends' Stories.
Good move. It seems like a pro-consumer move that is also, and for that reason, a savvy business move. Snap and Instagram as far as I can tell are are largely used by young people who don't like the noise, visibility, and clutter of Facebook. So this is an effective way for them to further distinguish themselves.
How innovative! Older chat "apps": ICQ, IRC, talkd, WinPopup always separated "Publishers and Creators" and my friends! Furthermore, there was separate device for consuming "Publishers and Creators" called "TV".